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Julie Mehretu at the Williams College Museum of Art (London)

Nigel Thrift is “a great admirer of the intricately layered, flickering topographies of Julie Mehretu, the Ethiopian-American artist. Though one can see all kinds of echoes in her work – the historical push of Delacroix and Goya, the geometric swirls and abstractions of Kandinsky, Klee, Malevich and Mondrian, the enveloping wash of colour field painting, the various iconic and graphical moments that act as the frames of popular culture, such as brands and comic books and tattoos, the kinds of excerpt protest represented by practices as different as those of graffiti artists, propagandists and situationists, and the poetics of contemporary architects like Hadid or Ando – I think she also produces something new, a sense of what high-velocity hybrid landscapes made up of many kinds of actor and of plural events happening at many locations might look/feel/work like.” (Thrift 2006, 139)

The work of Julie Mehretu appears in many recent books on art and maps, and as pointed out by Tracey Lauriault, the Williams College Museum of Art currently exhibit her work ‘City Sitings’.